Improving SharePoint Performance in Azure or AWS

Cloud solutions are great, but come with a price and I don’t mean dollars. Latency and often bandwidth concerns are now part of your hybrid network. Riverbed Cloud SteelHead can significantly improve performance and reduce bandwidth for cloud-hosted applications including SharePoint.

When you move SharePoint to Azure or AWS, you are also adopting a hybrid networking model where cloud hosted networks blend with local networks. This means you now have additional latency and probably bandwidth concerns that often have a negative impact on user experience and productivity. Your SharePoint servers are now in the cloud with higher latencies. In addition, connectivity to the internet is lower bandwidth circuit than internal LAN speeds. Combine lower bandwidth and high latency with the need for many users accessing the site and you have a formula for diminished performance.

Riverbed SteelHeads are designed to significantly improve performance in this specific scenario. You can deploy a Cloud SteelHead in Auzre or AWS and optimize your cloud-hosted SharePoint deployments using the same industry leading technology used with on-premise SharePoint deployments since SharePoint 2007. SharePoint Online with Office 365 is optimized with Riverbed SteelHead SaaS service.

Implementing SharePoint optimization in the cloud is straightforward and simple. Two SteelHeads are required, one at the on-premise location and one hosted as a virtual machine in the cloud—generally on the same virtual network as your cloud SharePoint virtual machines. First, deploy your Azure or AWS SteelHead and then peer with the on-premise SteelHead. For Azure, step-by-step instructions are provided in the Deploying SteelHead CX for Azure Workloads solution guide. Next, install and configure the Discovery Agent for your SharePoint virtual machines. The Discovery Agent provides several benefits including load balancing, high availability, and simplifying configuration. Finally, create and install any SSL proxy certificates required for your SharePoint servers. Configure your SteelHeads as you would for any SSL application. Then just add the in-path rule(s) that tell the SteelHead to optimize the cloud bound traffic. For AWS, use the one-click SteelHead deployment for in AWS which has the advantage of not needing a discovery agent on AWS hosted virtual machines. (Also availble the Azure SteelHead in the near future)

Once configured, you will see significant optimization results for your SharePoint activity. Up to a 98% reduction in bandwidth is expected for 2nd and subsequent document downloads e. In these circumstances, a 20MB file over a 2Mbps circuit with 60ms of latency will download in less than a second and yes, you can also optimize OneDrive!

Once your optimization path to the cloud is setup, you don’t need to limit optimization to SharePoint. You can you optimize other cloud based web, PaaS, and IaaS services as well. Shown below, is an example deployment in Azure.

You can even optimize SMB traffic to and from SMB servers in the cloud when using UNC paths in a hybrid network!

Ensure your users are happy with your cloud SharePoint deployment and other cloud services using Riverbed’s Cloud SteelHead for Azure and AWS.